Dominance of Literary Space in Paul Auster’s Oracle Night: A Maurice Blanchot Approach

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

1 Department of English Language and Linguistics, Faculty of Letters and Humanities, Razi University, Kermanshah, Iran

2 Dept. of English Language and Linguistics, Faculty of Letters and Humanities, Razi University, Kermanshah, Iran

10.22080/jlab.2026.31839.1022

Abstract

The present study examines the centrality of the man–environment relationship in Paul Auster’s novel Oracle Night, focusing on how the act of writing destabilizes and reshapes subjectivity. Sidney Orr, the novel’s protagonist, who many times saunters in the city, turns to writing as a means of compensating for what he perceives as the failures of his life. Yet the very process through which he seeks self-restoration places him on the threshold of erasure: his narratives resist authenticity, and his authorial presence becomes increasingly fragile, approaching anonymity and symbolic “death.” A similar fate befalls Nick Bowen, the character Sidney creates, whose attempt to narrate his own life ultimately confines him within a “fallout shelter,” mirroring the author’s entrapment. Auster thus constructs a metafictional frame narrative that portrays its protagonists as unsettled subjects, caught between authorship and impersonal abyss. This research argues that Oracle Night exemplifies what Maurice Blanchot theorizes as “the space of literature.” Sidney’s attempt to write after failing to die parallels Blanchot’s tripartite movement of writing—“Life,” “Death,” and “Being”—which correspond respectively to the stages of “Day,” “Night,” and “Other Night” dramatized in Auster’s novel. Through this lens, the text becomes a meditation on writing as both survival and self-dissolution.

Keywords

References

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Journal of Literature Across Borders
Volume 1, Issue 1 - Serial Number 1
Winter/Spring
July 2026
Pages 191-210

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